In Insane Clown President Matt Taibbi, a journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, chronicles the Republican primaries and the subsequent presidential election of 2016. He sets the tone for the book in his introduction in which he gives a fascinating insight into the dysfunctional hand-in-glove relationship of politicians and the media in the US. Existing within a frenzied bubble, this self-absorbed symbiosis moves as a herd from photo opportunity to photo opportunity, judging policies only by the response that they elicit in the polls and entirely losing any meaningful contact with the wider public.
The next chapter is odd and somewhat out of place. It is a precis of a previous book by Taibbi in which he predicted the rise of someone like Trump and, in order to adequately summarise the book, he has stuffed the chapter so full of footnotes that it is almost physically painful to read. After this, and making up the rest of the book, are reprints of articles written by Taibbi throughout the campaign.
In the early articles Taibbi spews witty invective, not only on Trump and his supporters, but also on anyone and everyone with right-leaning politics. It is interesting to see how the tone of the articles changed from arrogant derision to incredulous despair as the campaign progressed.
Throughout, Taibbi made valiant efforts to explain the unfolding events, including finally recognising the negative impact of the ‘gang-trolling’ of potential Trump voters by the media and warning that the Democratic Party was failing to see what a threat Trump really posed.
Without doubt Taibbi is an insightful and eloquent observer, and some of his thoughts during the campaign were frankly prescient, such as his predictions on the role of ‘fake news’ in the campaign, and the likelihood of a future President Trump banning media outlets from the White House. Reading this book has certainly piqued my interest in reading anything that Taibbi writes in the future, but the book itself suffers because it was out of date even as it went to print.
In retrospect, his analyses of the campaign as it was happening were remarkable but, unfortunately for him, you will already have heard all of these analyses a thousand times in the months since Trump’s victory.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2017